Nowadays, there are many shopping malls that manage electronic commerce, such as by brokering the trading of goods or services on the Internet. The on-line shopping malls enable buyers at home to conveniently purchase a variety of goods or services registered by sellers.
Brokerage methods used in on-line shopping malls include a method by which buyers select and purchase goods or services for which a price and conditions are registered by sellers, and an auction or reverse-auction method. The auction is advantageous to sellers because goods or services are sold to a highest bidding buyer, and the reverse auction is advantageous to buyers because goods or services are sold to a lowest bidding seller.
Accordingly, the auction is not conducive to transactions at a price and conditions that are advantageous to buyers and thus it is not easy to induce many bids by buyers. Meanwhile, the reverse auction is not conducive to transactions at a price and conditions that are advantageous to sellers and thus it is not easy to induce many bids by sellers.
A combination of the auction and the reverse auction is used to overcome their shortcomings. For example, a buyer can negotiate for a different price or conditions than suggested by a seller and purchase goods at the resulting price and conditions. When the negotiation is unsuccessful, the buyer can attempt to negotiate with other sellers for purchase of desired goods. A scheme by which a buyer registers a purchase request, a plurality of sellers make a bid, and the buyer negotiates with the sellers one by one is disclosed in Korean Patent Laid-open Publication No. 10-2000-54408.
However, in such a combined scheme, failure to negotiate a price and conditions between a buyer and a seller may cause unnecessary indirect costs associated with a transaction process. Accordingly, there is a need for on-line shopping malls enabling both buyers and sellers to advantageously use electronic commerce at no extra charge, particularly, for goods or services that cannot easily be traded on-line due to properties of markets and goods or related laws. Such shopping malls should allow the buyer to come up with an appropriate quotation based on a published quotation history and allow verified sellers to provide quotations rapidly and effectively in competition with one another.